An actor on the Ceeb shill-com, currently in its final year of production, recounts a heart-warming anecdote about how his show brought intractable enemies closer together:
[Manoj] Sood was quick to share a story that illustrated the attraction of Little Mosque to its international audience.
“When the show started in Israel and the West Bank, a news crew went to a Jewish family home in Jerusalem, while at the same time filming a Muslim family in the West Bank. It was interesting, when they showed a comparison that showed the Jewish family and the Muslim family were laughing at the same jokes,” said Sood. “It was more of a human issue rather than an ethnic, religious or cultural issue that they were laughing at.”
Now, if only they could all laugh at, say, jihad, "get off our land, you Jews whom the Prophet reviles" and the Palestinians' so-called right of return, everything would be fine. (Gee, do you think there are some problems that Little Mosque--which, according to Tarek Fatah, employed members of Muslim Brotherhood as consultants to ensure its scripts were in synch with Islamic thinking--can't solve?)
King Abdullah is second to none in the world in funding radical Islamist mosques and madrassahs. Soemthing to bear in mind when reading this bollocks about his dedication to "interfaith":
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia plays a big role in the international society. This is because of the blessings of God on this country.
The most important factors that grant Saudi Arabia this vital position are the existence of the Two Holy Mosques which have been awarding Saudi nationals a great honor of serving the Two Holy Mosques and the Muslims. This as well allows Saudi Arabia a leading role in the Islamic world.
In addition, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has attained an important global role of being the largest exporter of oil with the biggest oil reserves in the world.
All these religious and economic factors have helped the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia occupy and play a leading role in international society. Nonetheless, Saudi Arabia today enhances its global role by fostering King Abdullah’s Initiative for Interfaith Dialogue. This initiative reflects the perspective of King Abdullah and his government toward the international community.
King Abdullah’s initiative for interfaith dialogue would contribute to strengthen world peace and stability. Moreover, it aims at disseminating human values and promoting coexistence of the people of different faiths and cultures. Also spreading the values of peace and security and improving cooperation between communities...
If you don't think this is merely another opportunity to push da'wa on guileless infidels then you don't know Jack (or Mo) about King Abdullah.
The Ontario "human rights" kangaroo court has ruled that applicants for firefighting jobs should not be obliged to present a birth certificate or a driver's license because to do so would reveal their age--and that would be "ageism."
Toronto secondary students’ test scores are at the bottom of the heap.
Toronto public schools scored a 5.3 out of 10, a scale which the Fraser Institute uses based on province-wide test results in literacy and numeracy, slumping down near the bottom of 12 GTA school boards.
The results are well below provincial average of 6.0 and behind the GTA average of 6.2.
Just three out of 10 Toronto students in applied math met provincial standards. On literacy tests, Toronto high school students scored better, with eight out ten students meeting provincial standards.
However, the board’s overall subpar performance has been a trend for the past five years.
At the top of the heap, both Halton and York Catholic and public boards scored well above the GTA and provincial averages with marks of 7.4 and higher.
Toronto’s low marks beg the question: why are Toronto kids consistently under-performing?
The answer is as simple as A-B-C: kids don’t know core fundamentals in literacy and numeracy in elementary school and the problems are compounded as they reach high school, college and then university...
The transgender beauty queen who was disqualified from the Miss Universe Canada Pageant is to sue the competition because of her unfair dismissal, RadarOnline.com is exclusively reporting.
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, stunning blonde Jenna Talackova looks like she was born to be a beauty queen but was kicked out of the Miss Universe Canada competition after organizers discovered she was born a boy.
"There will be legal proceedings taken against the pageant," her spokesperson Rory Richards exclusively told RadarOnline.com, adding: "She can’t speak to the press directly at this time because legal action is pending."
Despite having undergone surgery to become a woman when she was 19, the transgender 23-year-old was banned from continuing, even though officials acknowledged Jenna as a "real girl," they disqualified her because the rules state all contestants must be "naturally born female."...
Which, in the age of "diversity"/"inclusiveness"/"human rights" entitlement uber alles is a real throw-back that cannot be allowed to stand.
In the first one, the editor raves about the return to office of "George Galloway, a Voice of the Oppressed":
George Galloway, an internationally renowned Palestinian supporter (watch video) and one of the biggest voices of oppressed people of the world made a sensational political comeback in U.K. Parliamentary by-election. He has inflicted a crushing humiliation on Labour. He termed the "Bradford Spring". He defeated Labour by more than 10,000 votes.
The Tories were pushed into third place, while the Liberal Democrats came fourth.
In his victory speech, Mr Galloway invoked the series of uprisings that have toppled dictatorships across the Arab world as he called his victory the "Bradford Spring"...
Or, more accurately, the "Bradfordstan Spring."
The second piece is by Sheharyar Shaikh, "the former President of North American Muslim Foundation [NaMF]...specializing in contemporary Islamic thought and modernity." (See Blazing Cat Fur's post about NAMF here.) Mr. Shaikh (Sheikh Shaikh?) hauls out the same old tu coque arguments in defending the contents of a Muslim marriage manual advising men to use corporal punishment on disobedient wives:
As far as the founder of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), is concerned, he gave the Muslims the best advice when he said: The best of you are those who are the best in conduct toward their wives. His wife Ayesha testifies that the Prophet was never seen to hit a servant, woman or an animal. His example is what we Muslims are to emulate at all times.
We Muslims are also enjoined to lend an ear to criticism. Some criticism however is simply unfair and amounts to propaganda and hate-incitement against one target community by giving the audience an incomplete or a distorted picture. The Toronto Sun review article on Thanvi's work A Guide for Muslim Couple is guilty of casting suspicion of misogyny and wife abuse singly on the Canadian Muslim community with no mention or regard for the era of the book’s authorship, misogynistic works of other faiths, presenting a distorted, one-sided impression of the book, and failing to mention female abuse as a serious issue confronting society at all levels. This is an example of journalism run by a vile agenda against the Muslim Community.
Some free PR advice for you, Mr. Shaikh: purely from a PR standpoint, I don't think it's a good idea to mention the Prophet's moppet wife in trying to make a case for the putatively contemporary mode of Islamic marriage.
Update:Houriya Ahmed reveals how Galloway smarmed his way into Muslim hearts (info that, go figure, wasn't in the GTA Muslims editorial):
Galloway reached out to Muslim voters and those with Pakistani heritage and told them they shouldn’t vote for the Labour candidate ImranHusain. He insinuated that Husain drinks alcohol and is therefore not a proper Muslim. He also told Bradford West’s voters that he has done more for Pakistan and Kashmir than Labour ever did. He reminded them that he has been the one who cares about Muslims by standing up to Western “imperialism” and has tried to “save the people of Iraq”, sided with Palestinians “in their agony” and has demanded an “immediate” end of the war in Afghanistan.
Update: Cue the jaunty British Invasion-era whistle:
Hey, there, Georgie boy, Oozing down the street so boastfully. Coasting to a win; They couldn't see the ugliness there Inside you.
Hey, there, Georgie boy, Pandering to Muslims did the trick. You are a slick trickster And your shtick's A hit with that crowd.
You're always Zion-baitin' And hatin' those awful "Jooos". In Bradford that MO couldn't lose, They loved it so!
Hey there, Georgie boy, There's no other Georgie deep inside. Your innerds: bad as your outside So no way there's gonna be A totally Reformed Georgie boy...
Danny Ayalon writes re Israel saying later, 'gator to the UN's "human rights" hucksters:
George Orwell, in his seminal essay "Politics and the English Language," penned a scathing attack on what he termed "meaningless words." These terms, he said, "are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different."
Orwell's description could equally apply to many who sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Never has a term been so misused and appropriated than in this body, bearing the term "human rights," which promised so much and delivered so little. Last week, the council once again showed its disdain for human rights by ignoring real ongoing abuses worldwide and instead focused on investigating Israel, a habitual obsession of the UNHRC.
Only 20of the 47 nations on the UNHRC, a minority, are considered "free" by the independent NGO Freedom House. The majority of nations currently represented on this self-styled "human rights" body do not allow basic freedoms for their own people, let alone concern themselves with global civil liberties.
The current roster of the UNHRC is a virtual who's who of global human rights offenders: It includes Cuba and Saudi Arabia -- not to mention Mauritania, where modern-day slavery is an entrenched phenomenon. Last year, while Libyan despot Muammar al-Qaddafi was massacring his own people, the Human Rights Council drafted a report full of praise for the former dictator's regime for its "protection of human rights."
In fact, many repressive countries seek a seat on the council -- not to advance the vision of Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the committee that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- but to serve as a barrier against the possibility of investigation and condemnation. It's a strategy that has worked well for countries like Saudi Arabia, where there is no freedom of religion, protections for minorities, or women's rights.
It is in this theater of the absurd that Israel was once again singled out last week for an investigation into Israeli communities in the West Bank, another opportunity for the Palestinians and their non-democratic supporters to commandeer the agenda as part of their diplomatic front against the Jewish state. This is a continuation of a policy that has seen 46 out of a total of 82 country-specific decisions directed against Israel. Meanwhile, there have been no investigations or decisions made against the likes of Saudi Arabia or Cuba.
This latest diplomatic attack on Israel has done no more justice to the discredited body. After all, there's no clearer sign that the UNHRC has lost the moral high ground than when the Syrian representative takes time out from defending the Assad regime's massacre of its own people to attack Israel...
One hopes this will be the start of a new trend, with other democracies taking cues from Israel and finally vamoosing from this loony bin, this odious cabal of self-righteous Zion-loathers. My one question re Israel's walk out: what took you folks so long?
Rami Khouri, a Palestinian journalist whose byline shows up on occasion in the Globe and Mail, pens one this time for the Toronto Star. In it he assures us that the dynamic between seculars and religious nutjobs (my phrase, not his) in "Arab Spring" lands is all for the good. He's certain that, in time, it will bring to much better-run governments, and that in the long run, the people of those countries will be far better off because of it.
Also, unicorns and rainbows will suddenly appear, and yummy falafel balls will fall from the sky to feed the hungry.
But with Hosni Mubarak's removal from power after three decades, government authority has collapsed in much of Sinai, leaving a vacuum where Islamist militant groups are flourishing, posing a security risk to Egypt, neighbors including Israel, and the Suez Canal, the busy waterway linking Asia and Europe.
In Sinai, an arid peninsula the size of Ireland but home to fewer than a million people, groups at the extreme fringe of the Islamist spectrum are expanding, even as Islamists long outlawed by the state enter the political mainstream in Cairo, where they now dominate parliament and are poised to enter government.
In towns where police stations have stood deserted since Mubarak was swept from office after a popular revolt, hardline Islamists are imposing their own authority. They are preaching a strict interpretation of Islam that has brought with it religious intolerance of a kind that shocks even some of the more conservative forces in the Muslim world...
Yeah, I'm sure they're, like, totally stunned. Aghast, even. Never saw that one coming, eh? A lot, in fact, like that sanguine Palestinian, who cannot for the life of him discern the unpleasant reality unfolding smack in front of him. Me? I'm not in the least aghast or even slightly nonplussed. I know that there's a sort of Gresham's Law in operation--bad fundamentalists driving out good (or, at least, perhaps not quite as bad) secularists--whenever these two sides line up in opposition in Muslim lands. And for anyone who thinks I know not of what I speak, I have two words for you: Iranian revolution.
New York Times columnist Nicolas D. Kristoff notes that a great deal of sex trafficking in the U.S. of underaged girls, is conducted through a Web site owned by Village Voice Media. I wonder how much if any of the same action is going on via the back pages of sanctimomious lefty rag NOW Magazine, whose boxes of free papers are ubiquitous throughout Toronto. (You could say the icky sex funds/fuels the even ickier politics.) Sure, the chicks trolling for customers in NOW claim to be out of jail-bait territory (the age 19 being especially popular, and no one claiming to be being older than 22-23) but who's to say they aren't significantly younger than that, and aren't being trafficked like the ones in the U.S. who toss up on the Village Voice Media site?
